One of the lessons I learned in church planting was to make sure you put the most important things in first. It’s called foundation laying. This is obvious, everyone knows it. The trick comes in actually knowing that the foundation has been properly laid.

The most important things also need to be laid clear in the life of the leader. If you don’t pray, the church might struggle. If you’re not welcoming, chances are the church will follow suit. For reasons beyond me, a church can often get it’s leaders weaknesses and strengths. Lord help them.

Take prayer for example. After years of battling and working hard, by God’s grace we’d grown. We’d won some key battles in seeing people saved and added to the church, we were growing out of that ‘vulnerable’ stage, teams were steadily being built up. There were challenges of course, there always are.

Then it somehow became evident that we didn’t really pray very much. That praying together wasn’t a high priority for many people, that church meetings (that I led so it was my fault) would have prayer squeezed into the last five minutes when everyone was done and looking at their watch wanting to get home. I was pretty sure that we weren’t a church devoted to prayer (Acts 2:42). It became clear to me too that prayer for me was too often a struggle. Praying with others fired me up, praying alone was just a slog. I wasn’t devoted to prayer and perhaps those two things were connected. We had to reverse engineer prayer into the life of the church.

Laying a foundation after the house is built is hard work, it can be done but it takes time and requires a greater investment of energy and leadership. We made significant progress, we invested in prayer meetings, we made prayer a higher priority for us as a team, we worked hard at it and we saw more and more answers but it was I’m sure the wrong way round. When you’re the church planter well there ain’t really anyone else to blame. I can make my excuses, give my reasons but at the end of the day that responsibility was mine.

So why didn’t I make sure this was right at the beginning? I think there are a few mistakes that I hope to avoid this time:

1. I assumed that people prayed. I shouldn’t. They often don’t. I often didn’t.
2. I was focused on the meeting and it was clear that the Sunday service was the main priority. That’s one reason why public meetings can wait.
3. I was drained by the challenges and the well ran dry. Come to me all you who are thirsty, Jesus said. I thought He only meant on Sundays.
4. I was too proud and scared to admit that my prayer life was often not what I thought a church leader’s should be, or could be or ought to be. That’s a big mistake right there and you run all sorts of dangerous games as a leader. You’re security in Christ can wobble with the Sunday numbers.

There are probably more reasons but those four are enough to be going on with. This time round, we’ll take our time to learn together what it means to be a church devoted to prayer.